We are a nation of dieters. About 45 million of us dieteach year and we spend between $1 and 2 billion per year on weight loss programs. But to be honest, this is nothing new. Fad diets are an American industry like no other, from Atkins to the Ice Cream Diet, we've done them all.
A new article in The State outlines the fascinating history of the fad diet all the way back to 1863 when William Banting invented the low carb diet. That's right; it wasn't Doctor Robert Atkins who first thought of a meat heavy diet, it was Englishman William Banting. He turned his nose up to "bread, butter, milk, sugar, beer and potatoes," in favor of loads of meat.
While you may have been called corpulent back in the early 20th century instead of obese or overweight, the message was the same. Once word of Banting's "Letter on Corpulence, Addressed to the Public," crossed the Atlantic, dieting or "banting," as it became known, was all the rage. At once we went from a nation where plump equaled wealth to the opposite. Though, we've no doubt ballooned in the past two decades, fad dieting is nothing new.
"An excess of flesh is to be looked upon as one of the most objectionable forms of disease," a Philadelphia Cookbook declared in 1900. Soaps boasted the ability to reduce flab and Bile Beans introduced the laxative to shed pounds.
According to the article:
The government's first advice to balance proteins, carbohydrates and fat came in 1894. A few years later, life insurance companies reported that being overweight raised the risk of death. In 1916, the Department of Agriculture came up with the five food groups. Around World War II, charts showing ideal weight-for-height emerged, surprisingly close to what today is considered a healthy body mass index.
We've been doing this for 150 years and what have we learned? Well, America is still the fattest country in the world and we're only getting fatter. The numbers are out of control considering that three out of four Americans are projected to be overweight or obese within 10 years. This on again off again mentality doesn't work. While there is no doubt that some approaches are better than others such as Weight Watchers and Overeaters Anonymous, our sick relationship with food is the underlying problem. Weight issues are often largely psychological and if a person is only dealt with on a surface level, a diet is only a bandage.
